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I have purchased a pair of warm and beautiful “snow boots” for Neva. First time she wore them outside – she came back home with soggy feet. The boots were useless! Or were they? Before throwing them away I thought I’d try something. And a waterproofing experiment was born.

You will need

– useless shoes (or any other item that might benefit)

– two pieces of fabric (or you can get more pieces and extend experiment with different substances/materials

– a candle

– a hairdryer

Rub your fabric with piece of candle so that it becomes much lighter colour and as much wax as possible rubs off (you can see it much better on darker fabric). Then blow on it with hairdryer on the hottest setting (you can see the colours returning to normal as wax melts into it.

To test – drip some water onto your piece of fabric to see if it it stays on the surface.

We used 2 handkerchiefs – one was rubbed with wax and other wasn’t. We wrapped both of them over a small pot and fixed with rubber band before dripping water on them (to collect the drips).

We waterproofed the boots as well, as you can see from the picture – the water sits on top without soaking in. Next week we’ll test how well that worked, on the slopes of Bulgaria.

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Here is a few things we’ve been enjoying lately that develop hand and wrist muscles and help with grip.

I have cut lots of strips of coloured paper same width as our mini-shredder that I found in a charity shop and they had such fun turning these into lots of colourful shreds.

Shredding coloured paper in mini-shredder

We didn’t know what to use them for at first, but they looked so bright that I kept them.
She used them for a while for her imagination basket and played unicorns in rainbows I think with some trucks and diggers in the mix.

Today we found them again and Neva cut out some cars out of cereal box and I punched some holes through it and she enjoyed threading brights strips of paper through the holes.

We had a fairly relaxing Christmas Holidays at home. Everyone was happy to enjoy later wakings and late bed times. And the massive amount of things that we manages to fit in the longer days almost accidentally. We tried to go out for a walk every day, even if it was a short one. Yesterday, it was raining a lot but there was a small window when it stopped.Read the rest of this entry »

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This year we went to the PYO farm to get a pumpkin, but I was unorganised and we were too late – the ones on the fields were all rotten, but we were already there and kids wanted to PICK SOMETHING!

So, we found a lot of crops that were not being picked and were going to waste and we took a few things home. Our loot included few sunflower heads, some corn ears and some broad beans that were lying about in the field. Girls were particularly excited about these ones once they have discovered that under the dried out brown pods were very brightly coloured pinkish -purple beans.

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We brought our treasure home and without delay they started peeling and shelling things. That was a good workout for their fingers!

We are going to throw in some conkers and some acorns and later on I’ll make them an autumn sensory bin. We haven’t had one for a while and girls love them! Hopefully the beans and corn wouldn’t start rotting. It’s quite peculiar thing happening in this neck of the woods – seeds tend to stat growing at the harvest time instead of saving their energy till next year. I don’t quite understand it. Some of the corn that we picked started sprouting right on the cob, beans were sprouting inside their pods and acorns in our garden are rooting themselves to the ground! I need to look it up, I am pretty sure that’s not how plant’s self-preservation supposed to work…

After a while of shelling beans I matter-of-factly put some cocktail sticks out and engineering began! I started them off with building a square-based pyramid, hoping to go through some of the other 3D shapes, but they had their own plans, and I didn’t mind. (beans were very soft, freshly picked – this wouldn’t work with dried ones)

We made some acorn deer today and learnt to use some tools (screwdrivers to make holes with and pliers to snap toothpicks with). Mya’s deer kept falling and she was getting frustrated. We looked at it’s legs which were all parallel and straight and talked about how much floor surface they are taking. We experimented with trying to balance on a balance board and decided that the stability is better when the legs are diagonal and spread wider, so they are taking more floor surface, I.e. the wider your support the more stable you are. We remembered examples from skiing and from some story book about snow shoes, where snow shoe surface was wider than foot surface therefore stopped you from sinking into the snow (not quite the same but similar principal). So we repositioned the legs and it stopped falling.

When the Deer was finished Mya discovered engraving. She sat for a while engraving something on the acorns.

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If your kids like drawing with chalks but apart from a chalk board you have no space for them to go wild and your garden is covered in grass like ours – pick up a large cardboard from a recycling centre – this will do the trick!

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We had a relaxed and at the same busy spring break. I usually plan a lot over holidays, few different holiday clubs, several outings a week on top of that (I usually get overbooked as there’s so many different interesting activities going on and I just try to fit everything in). But I just felt so exhausted that I didn’t want to go from one thing to another and I felt May can use some breathing space too. So in 2 weeks we only done 1 holiday club and one theatre outing, which was received with great excitement by the kids. Other then that – I have introduced a new word into Mya’s vocabulary. Spontaneous. This is what we were in the past 2 weeks. We did whatever came to us whenever we wanted. I think it worked wonders. Another new word she loves now is “determined”. Or, rather a phrase “small but very determined”. It is from an audio book we took from the library. It is called “Sophie’s snail”. Highly recommend. And it is also in connection to Mya conquering mount Snowdon this weekend. It took her same amount of hours as she the years she has been on Earth. Six hours from the bottom to the top and back down again. Small, but very determined was my girl!

I have been quiet for a while, not because we haven’t done anything I’d like to share, quite the opposite – I keep taking pictures of everything we do, and I am running out of storage space, but somehow I cannot get round to post anything, I don’t understand what is happening but I just can’t bring myself to do anything at all, a complete drain of energy. Everything seems a chore…

I will post some of our favourites from the past weeks in the next post.